Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta maintained his strong lead in the presidential election count on Wednesday with 85 percent of polling stations reporting, the election commission said. However, Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga has rejected early results of the election that showed he was losing to incumbent and long-time rival Uhuru Kenyatta, stoking fears that his disgruntled supporters could take to the streets.

As of 0300 GMT, the election commission website put Kenyatta ahead by 55.1 percent of votes counted to 44 percent for Odinga – a margin of nearly 1.4 million ballots with more than 80 percent of polling stations reported.

Kenyatta, a 55-year-old businessman seeking a second five-year term, had held such a lead since the start of counting after Tuesday’s peaceful vote, the culmination of a hard-fought contest between the heads of Kenya’s two political dynasties.

But Odinga, a 72-year-old former political prisoner and self-described leftist, rejected the results as “fictitious” and “fake”, lashing out in a late night news conference at which he said his party’s own tally put him ahead.

“We have our projections from our agents which show we are ahead by far,” Odinga said, questioning why published results were not accompanied by scanned copies of forms signed by all party agents in polling stations.

The son of Kenya’s first vice-president, Odinga is an ethnic Luo in the west, an area that has long felt neglected by the central government and resentful of their perceived exclusion from power.

Kenyatta, the son of the first president Jomo Kenyatta, is a Kikuyu, the ethnic group that has supplied three of the four presidents since independence from Britain in 1963.

On Tuesday, Kenyatta called on whoever lost to concede the race.

“In the event that they lose, let us accept the will of the people. I am willing myself to accept the will of the people, so let them too,” Kenyatta said as he voted at the Mutomo Primary School in Gatundu, some 30 km (20 miles) north of the capital.

Later, Odinga also told German broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, that he would also accept loss “in the unlikely event that I lost fairly”.

The winner needs one vote more than 50 percent, and at least a quarter of the vote in 24 of Kenya’s 47 counties.

In addition to a new president, Kenyans are electing lawmakers and local representatives, the result of a 2010 constitution that devolved power and money to the counties.